Nihilism and White Bliss in America’s Most Livable City – The New Republic

From a distance, Le Magnifique looks almost like a scene from a cartoon. The hero of the statue, former Penguins center and captain Mario Lemieux, is skating one way with the puck dangling on the blade of his stick, every bit the menace in the open ice who earned the right to be called the best hockey player who ever lived. (In this town, Gretzky is always second. And after a few beers, an argument about what kind of numbers Sidney Crosby would put up during the stand-up goaltending era may also come up.) On the other side of Lemieux are two defenders skating completely the opposite way, colliding, dumbfounded by this marvel of a human being who skates past with a Looney Tunes smirk on his face. The statue is beautiful, save for the hair. The hair on bronze statues always looks a little weird texturally, like uncooked ramen noodles.

The statue captures a moment from a December 1988 game against the New York Islanders, played in the Civic Arena, whenLemieuxsplit two defenders and displayed the violent power he could turn on and off. Like many of the citys white residents, fans of this very white game, I felt proud when the statue went up. Our hero, the citys icon, finally immortalized. And like many of the citys white residents, I didnt know what stood at the spot where he skated roughly 30 years earlier, in the 1950s, when the city razed over a thousand structures and displaced 8,000 residents, the vast majority of them black, to begin the arenas construction.

Last weekend, during Pittsburghs uprising in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, protesters spray-painted a hammer and sickle above Marios powerful wagon, and the phrase IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL. Unlike the poverty, mass surveillance, and routine state violence that black residents of the city are subjected to, and which the protesters made their target, the spray paint splatter on the citys idol was enough to get white Pittsburghers to finally pay attention. Sports radio personalities sprang into action to defend the poor statue, unable to defend itself, and fans rallied behind them, decrying the likelihood that any real Pittsburgher would ever defaceLemieux.

The implied neutrality of the statuea belief that some symbols can exist outside politics or geographies of raceattempts to bypass more urgent questions about where we are right now and why. Like why a statue of a white sports icon and the arena it guards may actively represent something quite different for generations of residents displaced by the franchise that has functioned as a selective engine for prosperity in a heavily segregated city.

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Nihilism and White Bliss in America's Most Livable City - The New Republic